[section_title title=Closer Look – Exterior]

Closer Look – Exterior 

Now to take a proper look at this case. Starting with the front, we can see that the whole exterior of the chassis is finished in a brushed, anodised aluminium. When this is teamed up with the stainless steel effect power switch and its blue LED ring, this case feel of a very high quality and just oozes style. On the bottom right of the case we can see that Cooltek have gone with a minimal front IO, this consists of two USB 3.0 inputs, these are connected up via an internal USB 3.0 header to the motherboard. We have also been given a 3.5mm headphone and microphone jacks.

On the opposite side of the front panel we can see the back of the PCB for the power switch. The large grill in the middle, at first glance, appears to be a fan mount. Y0u would be correct in thinking so, but it also doubles up as being a mount for a 3.5 inch hard drive too. Instead of mounting the fan behind this grill, you mount the fan on it. As there is no air intake on  the front of the case, mount the fan on the cage creates and airspace behind it. A fan mounted on the front would then suck in fresh air through the ventilation slits on the left and right sides on the chassis and therefore providing cooling.

Moving around to the back of the case. Cooltek have decided to implement a power supply at the top of the case instead of the bottom. I can understand the reasons for doing this, as they have left a lot of ventilation in the floor of the case for either storage devices or a graphics card to intake fresh air. I also feel that it is a slightly better move in the cable management department. As there are no cable routing holes in this case or any areas to hide cables, I feel that being able to bundle them up the top is the easiest and best looking away to keep the system tidy. We then have the standard motherboard IO cutout on the left hand side, the 120mm rear exhaust situated on the right and the two PCIe expansion slots at the bottom. A nice little feature to note is the implementation of a fan controller on the bottom left side, just above the Jonsbo U2 sticker. I will cover this a little more later on. Another nice little inclusion is the rubber washers around the thumbscrews. These have two purposes. One is to stop the user over-tightening the screws and the second is to stop the user scratching the thin aluminium and ruining the aesthetic. I will also point out that there is only one side panel to this case, so users will have to install the CPU heatsink before installation into the chassis.

Having a slightly closer look at the fan controller, it is a two way switch that powers the rear 120mm exhaust fan between 5v and 12v. This would obviously have a larger impact on noise than performance, but is still a nice feature as it is controlling the only fan in the case and Cooltek could have easily not implemented it. The fan controller has a single 3 pin fan header and is powered by a molex power source. We also get quite a good look at the brushed aluminium feet that Cooltek have decided to use. The have rubber bottoms to them, so will further absorb any vibrations and keep it safely in place.

Having a look at the side window. It spans most of the area of the side panel itself. This is a nice feature as it allows the user to see all of the components that they have used within their build without having a restricted view from a small window.

On the bottom of the case we get a better look at the ventilation and the SSD layout. The drives in the bottom can either be 2.5 or 3.5 drives and can be mounted either horizontally, as shown or vertically. Whether you will be able to use a larger 3.5inch drive will depend on what graphics card you are using in the system . The ventilated area is large and should aid in cooling any graphics card in the bottom of the chassis well. The only concern that I have is that without dust filtering, and it being the largest air intake in the system, dust build up could become an issue over extended use.

Here is a look at the back panel from the inside, which gives us a better look at the 120mm fan and fan controller implementation. The fan itself is Jonsbro branded and does provide some solid airflow without being too noisy. At the bottom left we can see the implementation of the fan controller with its 3 pin fan header and molex power requirement.

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2 COMMENTS

    • This is one of our older reviews where we used to use a different format for presentation – instead of all the info being shown in one page we used to split the reviews up into navigable pages so people could jump to the results they specifically wanted to see. You should see a orange navigation bar at the bottom of each review (above the comments section) and you can either click on the appropriate page number or select from the drop-down menu. We will eventually change all these older reviews to the current single page format but it’s a laborious process and we simply haven’t had the opportunity to complete the task yet.

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